2013 - another year gone by!

It never ceases to amaze me how fast the year 2013 went by - it seems like just the other day that we were ushering in the year 2013 and here I am writing about the year in retrospect!

All through 2013 the work-life balance has been fantastic and professionally much of has gone to plan. We have been successful in growing our algae in huge open ponds, been able to harvest them without spending too much money or energy and then the harvested wet algal biomass has been successfully processed into bio-crude - pretty much just as petroleum crude was made naturally below the earth's surface over millions of years, only we do it a lot faster and sustainably! We've even managed to take the renewable algal bio-crude and fractionate it into 12 different fractions of petro-products that include petrol, diesel, jet fuel, kerosene and naphtha. For us this was a vindication of our stand that we need only to find ways to maximise production of biomass in an energetically and economically sustainable way to be able to produce crude oil cost-competitively vis-a-vis petro-crude. Here in Chennai, India we have been working on ways to turn lowly algae into crude oil and much of our research work here has found application in our demonstration plant being built down under in Whyalla, South Australia. We are more than half way through building this demonstration facility that will go on-stream in January 2014. It will be the first facility in the world where it will be possible to go from algae grown in test-tubes to barrels of bio-crude and all this using sea-water and barren land by the sea thus avoiding any food vs. fuel competition.

 

Pictured above is our Demonstration Plant under-construction in Whyalla, South Australia

Hopefully it will all happen at a cost that is acceptable to the world. Fingers crossed!

 Fractionally distilled algal bio-crude converted to a range of petro-products

I have traveled a fair bit this year, starting with a trip in February to France where I caught up with Kenneth Birbeck and his family in Normandy. Ken's aunt was one of the first English-women to volunteer to travel to India to join the teaching staff of our fledgling school in the hills of Kodaikanal back in the early twenties. Thanks to Ken and his aunt's meticulously kept diaries we have a great idea of what it was like in the early years of our school which turns 100 years old in 2014.

With Ken and Claudie in Normandy, France

Sudha and I then traveled to Australia to join a few school buddies at their Australian Old Georgian Reunion in Inverloch in the State of Victoria where we had ourselves a great time catching up with friends from across Australia and a few from the UK.

                                                         With friends from school in Melbourne enroute to Australian Old Georgian Reunion

There were of course numerous trips up into the Blue Mountains of South India for planning our school's centenary activities and of course for the annual school reunion in July on the beautiful campus of our alma mater. We also had ourselves a terrific time in Bangalore at the offsite reunion of school friends organised by the Bangalore Old Georgians who did a terrific job of organising a fun time for so many of us.

On the family front it was the wedding of our Naval Officer son Ashwin that took up all our time and energy - yes, it all finally came together in a most enjoyable two- day celebration in early November and we had the honour of having some of our closest friends from school, my University and Sudha's childhood in attendance. Hats off to so many of our friends who travelled from the US, Europe, Australia, the UAE and Malaysia just to be there with us at the wedding.

                                                                                         We're six of us now that make up our family

We have been lucky to have a healthy year with nobody really having to undergo any significant health related issues. Our daughter, Ammu and husband Arun have been busy in Bangalore with work, their adorable Cocker Spaniel Mousse and also with a full house at home! 

                                                                             That's Mousse

The newlyweds, Ashwin and Devika are now back in Bombay where Ashwin is based aboard an Indian Navy submarine for now. Come January he will move to the School of Advanced Undersea Warfare (SAUW) at Vizag to undergo a one year conversion course that qualifies him to join the handful of Indian Naval officers who operate India’s only operational nuclear submarine.

For Sudha and me has suddenly dawned on us that with the marriage of the children out of the way there is a fair bit of time hanging on our hands especially when I get back from work in the evenings! We need to find ways to gainfully use the spare time. But then again there's the school centenary coming up and there's plenty to do on that front so that should keep me on my toes at least until July 2014!

Sudha and I would like to thank each and every one of you for the good times, friendship and fellowship you have shared with us over the year 2013. Here's wishing all of you, friends and family, a merry Christmas and a very happy 2014. We hope there will be at least a few occasions in 2014 when our paths will cross and we get to sit down somewhere in the world and catch up with all that's happening in your lives.

Warmest regards                                           

Sudha & Tusky

Down south in rural Tamilnadu

An old friend Oby (from my St Joseph's College, Trichy days) had a wedding reception for his daughter in a place called Ambilikkai in South Western Tamilnadu. Oby comes from an amazing family of Kerala Christian doctors who have settled in these parts for two generations and are doing yeoman service to the community there. They run the Christian Fellowship Community Hospital where thousands of people from a radius of over 50kms, go to get treated for Cancer, Gastro-intestinal disorders, Leprosy, Urological complaints and many more illnesses.

The reception was in the evening and I got there in the morning so I got around to doing a walkabout in the area. This is technically a very dry area and the dominant color is usually brown but this is the rainy season so the area goes very green, albeit for a very short time. Went around to a few of the farms there and learned a few things besides taking in the farming lifestyle of these simple rural folks. Here are some pictures some of you may enjoy:

A perfect heart-shaped abode of ants who stick the leaves of the sapota tree together with their saliva to build their home!

Clitoria ternatea - no money for guessing why that flower gets such an interesting name! It may soon turn out to be the source for unique cliotides that can cure some cancers!

I've seen the tamarind tree since I can remember but never noticed its flowers!

Maize fields in the foreground and the Pulney Hills in the background - typical rural scene in this part of Tamilnadu

 

Wild solanaceous flower - those golden yellow spots are to entice insects into the flower to pollinate the flower!

Yet another beautiful wild flower - not sure what its technical name is!

This is a first for me! Have seen this plant (Gloriosa superba - known in Tamil as Kannvalli) back home in Kerala and have admired its beauty but this is the first time I have seen it cultivated - it is grown for its seed and tuber. The seed has a high content of cholchicine and gloriosine both alkaloids are used to treat gout and rheumatism. Seeds sell for Rs 2000 a kilo.

Close up of the Gloriosa flower!

Those are the fruit of the plant that bear the seeds which are of commercial value.

Thats the farmer who grows those unique crops!

He also grows tobacco! With one crop he cures and with the other he kills!

A Suitable Girl

Its been over a year since we began looking out for a bride for our Naval Officer son. Like most folks these days we set out to put Ashwin's details on a popular matrimonial website in order to get us access to details of potential daughters-in-law. We did pretty much the same thing when it came to Ammu, our daughter, some four years earlier, but in her case we hit upon our potential son-in-law in as little as one week of posting her details on the site! And what was amazing was that we did not have her permission to put up her picture on the matrimonial website so only some textual detail was put up! We tried doing the same for our son but the fish were not biting! Which  meant we had to put up his pictures on the website along with a whole lot more details about him! 

Weeks went by with Sudha and I poring over hundreds of profiles and pictures of young things from all over the country and overseas but nothing was really clicking because even when we expressed interest the girls' folks seemed uninterested! With the few that did reciprocate interest there would be issues with the girl's looks, or the girl's family or the girl's educational background! But mostly the problem stemmed from the fact that most girls did not fancy marrying a Naval officer because they would be subject to frequent transfers (postings) which meant that they would not be able to keep their jobs. Then ofourse, there were those who felt that Ashwin's specialisation as a submariner meant he risked his life too often by spending too much of his working life at the bottom of some ocean somewhere! On occasion we would get to talk to potential brides' parents and try to set up initial contacts between Ashwin and the girl concerned but then something would give and the call between him and the girl would not materialise. Then it would back to the drawing board and poring over profiles and sending off details of more girls to Ashwin and getting him to shortlist a few who's parents Sudha and I would try and make contact with. Then one day we stumble across the details of a PYT who is based in Chennai but her parents were in Kerala - I manage to speak to the father of the PYT and was asked to send along Ashwin's horoscope and other details. Weeks go by and there is no come back from Kerala and then one day Sudha gets this call from a nephew's wife saying that they had a call from people they know, enquiring about the suitability of Ashwin as a bridegroom for their daughter. This nephew is also in the Navy and hence the referral by the PYT's parents to enquire about Ashwin. Ofcourse, Sudha's nephew assured the parents of the PYT that Ashwin was all of what his CV and matrimonial profile depicted him to be. 

I then get on to FaceBook to check out the girl and sure enough there she is - plenty of pictures of her there. Ashwin was asked to check the PYT out on FB and he comes back to his mother and wants to  know if we actually find the girl ok! He asks the question not once or twice but several times and wants to be assured that we were ok with the pictures of the girl! Its only then that we realise that he was asking because the PYT wore pretty modern outfits in the pictures, so the son was wondering why his parents were not scandalised by the pictures! Soon the parents of the girl and the girl herself paid us a visit at home and spent a little while with us over lunch and before long Ashwin and the PYT were on phone with each other. A week later we got the green signal from the son and then the marriage machinery begins to crank up. An engagement was in order, Ashwin and Devika (thats the name of the PYT!) were soon engaged and then they began their count down to November 3rd - the day they are to be married. 

 

Its amazing how fast time went by - before we knew it the wedding was upon us - Ashwin had in the meantime been posted out to Mumbai on INS Sindhu Vijay. Now it was about making sure the Navy gave him his leave to get married! He shows up on 2nd Nov morning to get married on 3rd Nov giving the bride and her folks plenty of kittens in their tummies wondering if he would be there for the marriage!

Suffice it to say that the pre-wedding party and the wedding went very well and Ashwin and Devika are finally man and wife thus ending one whole year of searching for a suitable girl! 

2012 - the year in retrospect

Like most years in my fifty five years of existence 2012 too was good, bad and indifferent but what matters most is that the good was a whole lot more than the bad and the indifferent put together!

The year started with some interesting developments on the professional front because our company decided to put its money where its mouth is and invested heavily in a biotechnology led algal biofuels initiative in Australia. Parallely, we set up an Algal Research Facility in Chennai, India to validate some of the algal research results we have shown in Australia as well as to develop solutions for some seemingly intractable problems in the algal biofuels domain. Happily for me and for the company much of what we had set out to do we have been able to demonstrate ‘proof of concept’ and show that we could well be on the way to producing bio-crude from algae – stuff that can actually go into a regular oil refinery whence it can be turned into petrol, diesel, kerosene and other fuels as well as organic chemicals.

 

Open Algal ponds (left) from which algae are harvested and processed into algal bio-crude (right)

Our Indian Algal Research Facility has recently been accorded recognition by the Government of India’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) – the only algal lab in India to be so recognized.

Algal research ponds in India

And in Australia the Federal Government recognized us by conferring upon us a major $ 4.4 million dollar grant from the Australian Biofuel Investment Readiness (ABIR) fund. It’s another thing that the money hasn’t yet begun to flow from the Aussie government but we are hopeful that it will start soon and we will be able to show the world that it is possible to produce bio-crude sustainably from seawater fed ponds built on un-arable lands, at costs lower than current petro-crude cost.Enough of blowing my trumpet I would imagine!

On the personal front life has been good – Sudha and I have been around a fair bit this year, both in India and overseas. Most of our travel being to Kerala, Ketti, Bengaluru and a bit of it overseas. My school reunions are still the best – we had an awesome reunion in school in July and then again in Kodaikanal not so long ago. These school reunions and get-togethers have been happening so often that a lot of folks (including our kids!) wonder how Sudha and I manage to find the time to get around to all of those reunions, meetings and get-togethers! Sometimes, I wonder too!! The reunions in Bali and Kuala Lumpur in Oct-Nov this year were fantastic and it was wonderful catching up with so many Georgians who showed up from all over Australia, Malaysia and India.

Sudha and yours truly aboard the Bali Hai II (left) some of the school alumni who made it to Bali, Indonesia

Health has been fine for me and mine but some of my friends have had to deal with reverses, a good friend in Berlin, Germany was diagnosed with Motor Neuron Disease which is progressively getting worse – he now needs 24x7 nursing care – he’s on a ventilator, has no control of his bowels and cannot find the strength to stand up and move about, ironically his mind remains as sharp as ever. Another friend from university lost a 25 year old daughter in a most heinous murder in Mumbai, India. And sadly two good friends in Australia lost their wives to the big ‘C’. We hope the families of these dear friends will find the strength of spirit to take them through these tough times.

Our children have been busy – Ammu and Arun moved from Mumbai to Bengaluru early in the year and that means we find ourselves heading off to Bengaluru at the drop of a hat. Their little doggy Mousse Nair is a major attractant for me to do that trip to the garden city! Ashwin also was posted out from the Indian Naval Submarine base in Vizag to the Indian Naval Academy in North Kerala where he is Divisional Officer in-charge of a Division of Naval Cadets and is mentor and tormentor to the bunch! We hope he will be able to nurture those young lads and lasses into the finest officers the Navy can possibly have.

Ammu, Ashwin & Mousse Nair

 

Ammu and Arun

We look forward to an eventful 2013 and hope that all of you, friends and family, have a healthy, happy, happening and joyful year ahead. May there be plenty of all the good things in life for all of you and very little of the niggles that life sometimes throws our way. It’s been an absolute treat to count you all among our friends  and family and we look forward  to    plenty of interactions with every one of you in the year ahead.

2011 the year that was

Its that time of the year when one looks back to see how good or bad this one's been. So how was 2011 the year thats just gone by, for you? For us I have to say it was all of good, bad and indifferent! The year began with some promise but the global financial crisis did not seem like it was in a mood to let up and it was beginning to draw Europe into its grip too. Until then our markets in Europe seemed fine and business was not too bad but as soon as Europe seemed to catch that cold we could see we were in for the shivers and as the year drew on we were not just shivering from the effect we were going malarial!

Some travel in March-April to Oz was great because it allowed me to switch off from my business woes in Europe and focus on some good times I had with OGs down under and with biofuels experts across Oz! Its always great to spend time down under because there are so many folks one manages to hook up with that even a few weeks down under would seem like its not enough. Catching up with the Begum, Garry, Noel, Jan, Debbie, Bruce, Jenny Lazaro, Kevin Lewis, Annalie and David and so many others in Sydney was just fantastic. Moving on to Melbourne and I got to meet up with John C-Gita, Trevor-Wendy, Nigel-Di, Peter-Olivia Steers, Rod-Glo and some others. In Adelaide it was great hooking up with the oldest known Old Georgian alive - William Pembshaw and his wife and then in Perth it was the icing on the cake - caught up with Glenn, Cherie, Paul Sargon, Peter Duncan, Dave-Sheela Alley, Howie-Pat Markham, the Cumine girls and so many others.

We had this Himalayan expedition plan in the works for some time and come July things were falling into place for us on that front - our trip to Ladakh and Leh was upon us and boy was it full of excitement. For me that must rate as one of the best trips I have done because those mountains are just so awesome. Most importantly the trip was done with friends from school and thanx to the good offices of the Army we got about to some awesome places.

Bindu, Sudha, Doc Jimmy, Mary and Sheila at Khardungla - 18.380 feet above MSL

The second half of the year 2011 saw Sudha and me doing a fair bit of travel in the country - I finally got around to spending time with my daughter and son-in-law in Mumbai after almost a year of their marriage! It was exciting because I was going to be spending time with their cocker spaniel puppy named Mousse Nair!

Momma and Mousse Nair

As the year drew to a close the marriage season beckoned - We are at that age when our buddies have children of marriageable age and there is no way we can wriggle out of being at those weddings!

I'm not mentioning the two reunions in the year - both of which were a lot of fun and fellowship - you all know about them so I will not labour the point!

Georgians outside Baba Pujara's home in Coonoor - getting set to leave for the old valley

The children have been good - Ashwin has moved to the Indian Naval Academy as Divisional Officer where he mentors fresh cadets joining the Navy in a spanking new Academy. Am looking forward to going there and checking out the place - Sudha has already done her round of the Academy! Ammu and Arun are good too - they have been getting ready to move base from Mumbai to Bangalore because IBM has decided to move Arun that way. Their lives have been consumed by their little Mousse - its wonderful to see how they are enjoying their first begotten son!

Sudha poses at the waterfront at the Indian Naval Academy, Ezhimalai

There are just another 3 days to go before the world turns another year older - allow me to wish you all, wherever you are, a fantastic new year and may there be lots of happiness, health and prosperity in store for all of you.

Read only mode

Some nine years ago I set out to connect some of my university buddies with each other and all of us by setting up an e-group for them. The concept was new and exciting then - it was easy get my University friends, located all over the world, to  subscribe and enjoy the networking. It was amazing how some 72 of us could positively use the network which was abuzz with an average of some 300 mails a month. Ofcourse, for a university that had an annual intake of over 3000 people that was really a small number of us who were in touch with each other! But it was great because we shared so much through the e-group - then, one of our group, a revered and most admired member of the group passed away and left us all suddenly all too aware of our mortality! Thanx to the e-group we re-grouped and actually started a campaign to set up a scholarship in the old university in the name of our dear, departed friend. It did not take us too long to collect a corpus of funds from all over the world and put it in fixed deposit in the university so as to allow the interest to be used to pay out the scholarship. It paid for one student every year and covered his/her entire cost of studying (three years) at the university - at the time it was the highest paying scholarship in the university. 

                                                                                   An aerial view of the 12,000 hectare university campus in the foothills of the Himalayas 

Soon I began wondering why my boarding school buddies did not network in this manner - suggestions to start an e-group similar to what I had set up among my University friends did not elicit an excited response. But start it I did and in a month we had just some 50 people signed on. It was fun because there were so many shared experiences to talk about online. One thing led to another and we had dozens of folks registering for membership in the e-group - all people who passed through the portals of the nearly 90+ year old school, people who lived in far flung places on every continent!  In a years time we had clocked up a membership of over 1000 ex-students which was amazing given that only 4000 students had ever studied in the old school! The e-group became the main communication tool for alumni of the school to arrange reunions worldwide and the annual reunion in the old school nestled in a beautiful valley in the hills of south India.

          The beautiful valley of Ketti with the 260 acre boarding school campus spread on either side of the school steeple

On the school e-group we were soon averaging something like 2000 mails a month by the year 2008 and the community was humming along until somebody got intemperate with somebody online and there are sides being taken and we soon have a situation not very different from what would happen in a living, breathing neighbourhood! Thats when one realises that virtual communities have all the attributes of real communities and it becomes necessary to moderate (thus was born the concept of policing!) people's activities online! As the Moderator of the school e-group it was tough deciding whether a particular line of communication will split the e-group down the middle or if some dissent and open talk should be allowed to occur! 

Soon we had the Orkuts, Facebooks and LinkedIns of the world making their appearances online and those social networking tools suddenly seemed so much more 'in' and e-groups were passe! The activity on the e-groups shifted to FB and before we knew it most communication was happening in one line form on these new-fangled social networking forums. I chose to stick with the e-group and tried very hard to keep communication alive on the e-group and just about managed to keep the mailings to about 1000+ every month in the school e-group - but on the university e-group it had dropped drastically to almost 30 mailings a month! By now membership on the School alumni's FB page had hit 1700 while we in the e-group were still at around 1200+ but like most of these networking tools the initial hype and hoopla wear off and the FB page too starts to show a massive dip in communication. Interestingly, I've learnt that its not that people are not viewing the FB page or checking mails on the e-group. Its just that they have all switched to read-only mode (ROM)! They have all kind of begun to expect that a small group of folks will keep writing in and keep people posted of whats happening in the world of their alumnae! Kind of unfair it would seem but thats the way the cookie crumbles. If those few who do keep the system humming do not write in I imagine it will soon be curtains for these e-groups and social networking sites.

   

Back from God's own Country

Its been a hectic long-weekend - there were two marriages in the family to attend - the first in Thiruvanathapuram (TVM) and the next in Kottayam. The children were going to be attending the two weddings so that was incentive enough for me to be around at these weddings. These days its a big deal if I get to spend a whole day with one or both the brats because they are the busy bodies and so it should be! Our daughter Ammu and her husband Arun headed to TVM via Chennai earlier so I had gotten to see them for two days in Chennai. Two days after they left for Kerala our son Ashwin showed up in Chennai after his leave from the Navy was approved just at the nick of time for him to catch that flight to Chennai. Haven't seen him in a long time so it was good catching up with him. He spends most of his time prowling the depths of the Bay of Bengal manning an Indian Navy submarine so it is kind of difficult to catch a peek of him even when he surfaces!

Arun, Ammu, yours truly, the bridegroom (Timki), Sudha and Ashwin

Marriages, like all marriages in God's own Country, are a raucous occasion for family and friends to meet and share experiences after sometimes 20 or 30 year hiatus! The colour and confusion of these occasions are actually quite enjoyable if you are not part of the organising. The girls look very pretty in their wedding clothes and can keep most men quite busy simply gawking at the PYTs! But every once in a while one has to be careful to look away so that those PYTs do not ask their friends 'what was wrong with that dirty old letch sitting in that chair over there?' In actual fact I was also casting my eyes about for a 'suitable girl' for that Navy brat of a son I have but those PYTs don't know that so I would qualify for a dirty old letch in their minds! Once in a while if I did spot a potential daughter-in-law candidate I'd sidle up to my son and ask him 'how that girl in white' was and I'd get a dirty look from my son as if to say 'give me a break Acha'!

 All decked up - cousins from all corners of the country and overseas

When one sees the assemblage of some 500-600 people at these weddings, folks who have traveled from far and wide both from within and outside the country one can get a feel of the kind of money that gets spent on these weddings - not just by the bride's folks but also by those coming to attend the wedding. On a typical day when the stars are all aligned well there must be a few hundred such weddings taking place across the state I would estimate the total money churn to be of the order of about Indian Rupees 2 billion on just that day - in dollars that would be a cool 45 million dollars! And they say ours is a poor country! Maybe its a poor country with a lot of rich people! 

The wedding stage all decorated and ready to receive the bride and bridegroom